Actually, the deficit is on track to hit $1.2 trillion this year, but what's $200 billion among friends?
Seriously, what is it? To the average person, a number that big probably doesn't mean much. At some point long before the hundred-billion-dollar mark, large numbers simply become figures on the page, well beyond human scale and intuitive understanding. And yet as discussion about the economy and the impressive numbers that come along with it continue to dominate the news, it may be more important than ever to try to understand. Is a $700 billion financial-industry bailout a lot? Is a $775 billion economic-stimulus package enough? (See the worst business deals of 2008.)
Unfortunately, our puny human brains aren't particularly up to the task. Go back thousands of years and think about the simpler times of human existence. "We had a few friends; we had to be scared of a few animals. A trillion didn't come up very often," says Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos, whose book Innumeracy addresses the topic. "There is a sense that when numbers are too big or too small, the brain just shuts off," says Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at the California Institute of Technology. "People either don't think about it at all or there is fear, an exaggerated reaction."
The genius of our numbering system is that we can signify massive quantities in short spaces. One billion takes no longer to write than one million does, points out Andrew Dilnot, an economist at Oxford University and author of The Numbers Game.
But that similarity trips us up when it comes time to imagine how those figures translate to the real world, where three more zeros make all the difference. "My favorite way to think of it is in terms of seconds," says David Schwartz, a children's book author whose How Much Is a Million? tries to wrap young minds around the concept. "One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years. I like to say that I have a pretty good idea what I'll be doing a million seconds from now, no idea what I'll be doing a billion seconds from now, and an excellent idea of what I'll be doing a trillion seconds from now."
